Many types of samples (e.g., clinical, environmental, food, and beverage samples) are routinely tested for the presence or absence of microorganisms. In particular many samples are tested for the presence of pathogenic microorganisms. Often, the samples require various types of pre-treatment (i.e., processing prior to a detection step) in order to increase the number of target microorganisms, decrease the number of non-target microorganisms, concentrate the microorganisms, and/or reduce the quantity of potentially-interfering material in the sample. The pre-treatment steps may be laborious and can take several hours to several days to complete. A variety of materials and devices have been developed to reduce the number of steps and the time that it takes to complete the pre-treatment of samples.
Processing a plurality of samples simultaneously can be difficult because of the lack of simple, efficient devices for the procedure. There remains a need for simple, rapid methods to prepare one or more samples for the detection of microorganisms.